“How can you not get romantic about baseball?”
Being a Jamaican, or basically any nationality other than American I believe, I’ve heard a lot of discussions about how stupid baseball is. I personally do not agree with a lot of those arguments. However, I do not watch baseball. I couldn’t tell you what makes a Red Sock better than a Rocky, or an A better than a Met. With that said though I do understand baseball (or I think I do), and more importantly I can understand the idea of sports management.
Sports, professional sports to be more precise, is one of the few professions available to the people of the world which has the ability to suck people in and chew them up and leave nothing else and only the chosen few will actually exit the other end with more than what the game took from them in the process. People who deem themselves experts will decide based on certain factors as to whether a player is worth being a part of their own system, this decision is never foolproof. What ends up happening at the end of that road of decisions, if things don’t work out, is that the sport has possibly taken a person away from any other career opportunities that he could ever have and leaves him with nothing other than a middling career in a sport that will barely ever remember him.
I started out talking about how I don’t know baseball; that remains true. Last year Aaron Sorkin won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but at the same time his screenplay wasn’t exactly what you would describe as historically accurate. While accuracy isn’t what I require in a film – as I generally am able to figure out which elements are probably real and which might not be – it is something to be weary of. Sorkin crafts the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Peter Brand’s (Jonah Hill) financially constrained undervalued team that managed to somewhat redefine the idea of how baseball (and if you decide to extrapolate a little bit sports in general) decides who is and isn’t a good/worthwhile player and he decides to mirror, or at least imply, it along with Beane’s history with baseball as a player and his professional disappointments. I don’t know whether any of that has ever been stated as truth, that Beane decided to go down this road due to his own personal experience as a player, but it does reek of the same made up reasoning that Zuckerberg made Facebook just for a girl.
The problem with this is that it does this: it isn’t just about finding another way to win it’s pointing the finger back at all those teams with five times the financial power that Beane had available to him and asks “Why?”. Why are we paying players twenty million dollars a year to do what effectively, in the correct system, a player deemed to be worthy less than a million a year can achieve.
Part of me looks at this film and can feels that it’s in essence proof as to what baseball, and all team sports, exemplifies, which I believe was best explained by this quote from The Untouchables, “Baseball! A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team. Teamwork… Looks, throws, catches, hustles. Part of one big team.” The game is a game of the team. It’s more about keeping the other team from scoring than scoring yourself. However, Beane decides to take the game in the other direction by working harder at getting runs through this new system of player selection which is interesting but at the same time not very well portrayed on screen other than seeing the result on a scoresheet actually printed on screen and a couple crowd shots of them cheering.
What makes me feel at the end of the day that this film didn’t quite live up to the expectations that it set itself up for had to be the film’s penultimate scene. With the season over, and for all non-baseball fans unsure of what the real result was since they don’t explicitly tell you how the A’s did (not the point though), Brand asks Beane to come and look at a video of who must be the fattest man I’ve ever seen play a professional sport. Brand goes on to give a monologue about how the unconventional sometimes brings out the most unpredictable results and how we sometimes need to reach out for that, what other people call, unattainable goals for us just so maybe we can actually achieve them. At this point the movie blatantly admits that while it’s been walking kindly around this point it’s never quite got there and has to resort to adding in this slightly irrelevant, while still great, scene.
Otherwise the film works great. There’re character ticks and moments that while somewhat obnoxious at times eventually work out and I enjoy. I even like how the film eventually explains why Beane doesn’t attend the games with such a great moment during the film’s Streak chapter.